jaeleslie

sat on their park bench like bookends

Most of this weekend I spent with best friends from thirty-odd years ago. My friend V, who I have known since we were twelve, drove up from Naperville Saturday morning for a weekend without spouse & kids. She stopped with J in Monona and they picked me up for lunch. V & I first became fast friends with J when she moved to Whitewater in our first year of high school. Then after I moved to Madison for college both of their older sisters were here, and I spent a lot of time with J's family for holidays and whatnot, just as I have with V and my Cuban family at other times.

Saturday we bounced around town, to lunch at Hilldale and back to Monona to drop off J's son, then caromed up Monona Drive and back across town for the Laura Spiess Memorial Book Swap at Shorewood, where they met Replyhazy and some other local fans, then off to State Street, and when I was entirely worn out back out to Monona, and then a Thai dinner on Willy Street. Sunday I went to J's for a family breakfast. Then eventually V came back to my house before she left town, to pick up a couple dozen assorted raspberry canes (red, purple, and black) for transplanting to her own garden.

And of course the whole time we talked talked talked. We are all moms now and have pursued various careers. V is a public defender, and J is a special education teacher. And with all the catching up we had to talk about, they accepted both that we should all have been parted for many years, and then that we should happen to come together now again with happy accord and understanding.

Last summer they were at a high school reunion in Whitewater, which I wasn't able to attend as I was in Ohio at the calligraphy conference. Since then I have taken out my journals from the first semester I was in college, just to work out how the far too interesting events of that time in our lives affected me, and discovered incidentally how useless college was to me, how it actually drove me off from writing about what I had to write about: what has been given me.

time it was
and what a time
it was
it was

So we were able to compare our thoughts and recollections, what we knew of each other then, of what as variously traumatized adolescents we were oblivious, and now as mothers of adolescents are able to make some sense. But I don't think it will be so long again before we see each other. It is unspeakably wonderful to have such friends.

long ago it must be
I have a photograph
preserve your memories
they're all that's left you